DORA CARRINGTON will begin Saturday, May 12th, and continue through Friday, June 8th.

DORA CARRINGTON will include about 40 works on paper, consisting of both mature works and of sheets from three sketchbooks CARRINGTON used as a child. The early watercolors and drawings are unusually deft, remarkably observant, and very like some of her adult work. They show a strong resemblance to such pictures as the 1922 Kitchen Scene at Tidmarsh Mill and to the countless quick drawings with which CARRINGTON illustrated her enchanting letters, letters which, Michael Holroyd wrote, “reveal how she had carried her instincts miraculously intact from her childhood into adult life,” a statement which applies equally to her art.

In 1978, Sir John Rothenstein, for nearly 30 years Director of the Tate Gallery, London, called DORA CARRINGTON “the most neglected serious painter of her time.” That is no longer the case. In 1995, there was both a major retrospective of her work at the Barbican Art Gallery, London as well as an award winning film starring Emma Thompson as CARRINGTON and Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey. There have also been numerous books written about her, including Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s Carrington: A Life (1989) and Jane Hill’s The Art of Dora Carrington (1994).

Nevertheless, perhaps it is still for her dramatic life and complex relationships that CARRINGTON is best known. Possessed of a remarkable personal fascination, she seems to have cast a spell on those around her. She figures in a number of novels, among them D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (as Minette Darrington); Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God (as Betty Blythe); and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (as Mary Bracegirdle).

The pictures in this exhibition belonged to Alix Sargant-Florence Strachey, in whose family they have remained until now. They have never before been shown, and constitute a significant addition to CARRINGTON’s small oeuvre. Alix Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s sister-in –law, was CARRINGTON’s close friend.